ideaLaunch Blog

Internal linking strategy is often the “forgotten middle child” of the SEO content creation world. But a strong internal linking strategy improves your search engine rankings and turns your website into a cohesive work of art, a “web” of useful information for your readers.

The best internal linking strategy takes planning. If you blog a lot, build an editorial calendar to

map out your blog posts for the week, month, or even the year. You’ll spot lots of opportunities for internal linking. By planning post topics in advance, you won’t forget about relevant posts you wrote months ago, and you can breathe new life into them with an internal link. Here are some tips on internal linking strategies you might not have thought about.

1. Don’t tell the whole story. Don’t give away the farm in every post. Instead, use early posts to build basic concepts, and expand on those concept in later posts, linking back to key points. Think of those internal linkbacks like a book or movie sequel, which spends some time in the first chapter or the beginning of the movie re-telling the back story.
2. Share related stories. Adding a “related stories” widget to your blog provides the perfect opportunity for internal links. When you work from an editorial calendar, you’ll have a good idea of what posts will show up in that list.
3. Don’t be afraid of outbound links. Outbound links encourage linkbacks from the blogs you linked to but, more importantly, they can help your blog post go viral. You can count on the blogger you linked to sharing your post with his network—and his readers may share it with their networks, and so it goes. If you believe in “content karma,” you can build your bank account with outbound links. But even if you don’t subscribe to “paying it forward,” generous outbound links are an effective internal linking strategy.